Qualcomm Japan eyes 3G chip market
The company aims to carve out a significant share of Japan's market for W-CDMA chips, used in NTT DoCoMo and Vodafone mobile phones with high-speed Internet access.
"Japan's midtier mobile phone market is comparable to the high-end market in the rest of the world. That's the sweet spot we'd like to hit in the W-CDMA chip market," said Ted Matsumoto, president of San Diego-based Qualcomm's Japan unit.
Matsumoto said the midtier mobile phone market in Japan could be doubly attractive if Japanese mobile phone makers sell their phones overseas as well.
Qualcomm owns most of the patents to CDMA, or Code Division Multiple Access, the leading wireless technology in the United States and Asia. It licenses its technology and supplies nearly 90 percent of the chips for CDMA phones worldwide.
In Japan, where its technology has been adopted by operator KDDI, it has a 100 percent market share CDMA in phone chips, Matsumoto said.
Most operators base their networks on GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) technology, an alternative to CDMA.
Qualcomm, though, has been eyeing the chip market for GSM's third-generation version, W-CDMA (wideband code division multiple access), which shares technology in common with CDMA.
Japan is a particularly attractive market because it was one of the first countries to launch W-CDMA more than two years ago.
DoCoMo, Japan's dominant wireless operator, has more than 2 million customers on its W-CDMA network, compared with just a few hundred thousand in European nations such as Britain and Italy, where operators are struggling with limited phone selection and inadequate coverage, compounded by handset shortages.
Matsumoto sees Japan's leading position in the WCDMA as a market opportunity for Japanese mobile phone makers.
"We would of course like to help and encourage Japanese mobile phone makers to expand overseas," Matsumoto said.
Qualcomm's W-CDMA chips are currently used in a phone made by Sanyo Electric for Vodafone Holdings, the Japan unit of Britain's Vodafone Group. Its CDMA chips are also used in phones by Kyocera, Toshiba, Sony Ericsson and Casio-Hitachi.
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